I have a correction. Two of my instructables were entered into contests, and only one remains as a finalist, and has the "cup" icon. So if an instructable is entered into a contest, the icon might be on the page until the contest goes into judging and only remains if it's a finalist as the alt text says. Attached is a screen shot using the developer tool Firebug in Firefox (which is what I do for a living.) You can see the same scouring the source code via View Source on any given page.

An aside, the alt attribute is a required (X)html attribute for images as alternate text for devices that don't display images, and is often (incorrectly) not used at all. Fortunately on this site it's correctly used and can provide clues to iconography, but most people wouldn't know to look for it.

Phew, ya got me on that one. In this case they are using the image as a background image on an element (the purplish area in the attached) which is different than a direct assignment to an image element. It **seems** to indicate it's a CSS class for an award winning "answer" - did you receive such a credential?

It may be that in this revision of the site, they overlooked the assignment of that selector - easy to do on large sites. It may be an oversight on the developer's part. I'd bring it up to support.

Good point, iconography is not as universal as the originator might think it is. :-) The ALT tag for that image says "contest winner" but it's true meaning is "entered into a contest." (When used as navigation elements it's called "Mystery Meat Navigation") The one with a star is Featured. That's all I got. :-)

Now that i look a little deeper both my contest entries don't have the golden badge. The golden badge screen shot was from a question a had asked. But its not always visible, depends what direction you start at to look at the question